As someone who takes her cues on net neutrality from Gigaom’s resident expert Stacey Higginbotham or, failing that, John Oliver, this is hard to admit: Mark Cuban may have a point on why the proposed net neutrality regulations may be a cure that’s worse than the disease.

If adopted, he maintained, these regs will open the door to more confusion, more litigation and more overall turmoil, none of which will serve consumers well. Before you throw your device at the wall, just give him a listen. Cuban, the serial entrepreneur who started out as a VAR before founding Broadcast.com which sold to [company]Yahoo[/company] in a $5.7 billion stock deal in 1999. He is now owner of the Dallas Mavericks, co-star of Shark Tank and CEO of of AXS TV and interestingly a star of new AT&T commercials. The hyphens just keep coming.

Here’s his gist on net neutrality. He doesn’t think the big bad ISPs have behaved all that badly, or all that differently, than they ever have, so why all the hubbub now?

“It’s not like [company]AT&T[/company] and [company]Comcast[/company] have recently become super big companies and changed their actions… One of the tenets of net neutrality is that no legal website should be discriminated against. Well, name me one that has been.” He also pretty much dismisses [company]Netflix[/company] claims that it in fact faced such discrimination.

He sees competition ramping up in both in wired and wireless access — if these markets are so foreclosed why is Google doing broadband? Why is “AT&T going out of its traditional TV markets where they have U-verse to compete with Comcast and Google? That’s one layer. On the other layer you have mobile, with [company]Cablevision[/company] going into Manhattan where [company]Verizon[/company] and AT&T have broadband wireless and putting together an unwired wifi network for $30 a month’

His point is that there is competition, although it may not be the competition we would all like to see.

Cuban is clearly worried about one, well two mega players and neither one is a big ISP. “I would rather see national competition for [company]Google[/company] than no competition for Google. If you put a lid on Time Warner and Comcast and Google just keeps adding more and more markets, who’s going to compete with them?”

Google and [company]Apple[/company] constitute a huge countervailing force for all the ISPs because of their mobile might. “The fastest growing access for Internet is mobile. Who controls access to mobile? Google and Apple. The far greater risk is if Apple decides that the Comcast app is not right, Comcast won’t be able to reach most of its market to give access to its own broadband. Kind of crazy but it’s a possibility.” For the record, he isn’t recommending regulation to stop that either.

His point isn’t that Comcast or Time Warmer or insert-your-least-favorite cable provider here) are so great — he admits they are not — it’s just that the FCC its regulations are ill equipped to deal with fast-changing technologies. The public would be better served to let the cable companies duke it out with each other and, perhaps more to the point, with far scarier competitors including Google and Apple.

He starts about 10 minutes in. But here is the kill shot: Do you really want the same organization (the FCC) that took 8 years to deal with Janet Jackson’s Wardrobe Malfunction at Super Bowl XXXVIII to be the gating factor in the internet? Ummmm, maybe not.

Listen to the whole thing to find out how you, too, can get in touch with Cuban, such a shy and reserved guy, to ask your own questions on net neutrality; whether the NBA is seeing diminishing returns on data analytics; and why the heck the Celtics let the Mavs steal Rajon Rondo. Whatever.

Businessman and TV personality Mark Cuban speaks onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt at Pier 48 on September 8, 2014 in San Francisco, California.

In our intro section, Jonathan Vanian and I discuss all (or a bunch anyway) of this week’s Kubernetes news — where Mirantis was latest into the pool, working with Google to bring the cluster management framework to OpenStack clouds, joining HP and a raft of other tech vendors endorsing the open-source framework. Interestingly, Spotify blazed its own trail, Helios as opposed to Kubernetes for its own workloads.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/02/25/mark-cuban-on-net-neutrality-fcc-cant-protect-competition/feed/6Twitter is latest to boost FCC’s net neutrality planhttp://gigaom.com/2015/02/23/twitter-is-latest-to-boost-fccs-net-neutrality-plan/
http://gigaom.com/2015/02/23/twitter-is-latest-to-boost-fccs-net-neutrality-plan/#commentsMon, 23 Feb 2015 15:08:37 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=916414Twitter came out on Monday in support of FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan to impose net neutrality, which is slated for a critical vote on Thursday, praising it as a way to ensure free communications and an open internet.

“Safeguarding the historic open architecture of the internet and the ability for all users to ‘innovate without permission’ is critical to American economic aspirations and our nation’s global competitiveness. These rules also have important implications for freedom of expression,” said the company in a blog post.

[company]Twitter[/company]’s endorsement of the plan, which would prevent ISPs from speeding up some websites at the expense of others, is significant given the company’s role as a major media company, and its historical advocacy of free speech.

In its blog post, Twitter pointed out a familiar refrain of net neutrality advocates: that emerging companies depend on access to the internet platforms that will carry their products and ideas.

“This openness promotes free and fair competition and fosters ongoing investment and innovation … Without such net neutrality principles in place, some of today’s most successful and widely-known Internet companies might never have come into existence.”

Twitter also endorses Wheeler’s plan to use so-called Title II rules, and treat ISPs as common carriers, in order to enforce net neutrality. Those rules have touched off a massive lobbying campaign by Republicans backed by the cable industry, which is seeking to characterize the measure as executive overreach. Twitter, however, pointed out that the agency is applying the rules in a “light touch” fashion, and avoiding the more burdensome parts of the regulation.

Twitter’s decision to publicly endorse Title II comes after a variety of other companies, including [company]Netflix[/company] and Etsy, have argued the rules are necessary to ensure ISP’s don’t use their control over internet pipes to stifle potential competition.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/02/23/twitter-is-latest-to-boost-fccs-net-neutrality-plan/feed/2The curious case of Angela Merkel and her EU data retention ideashttp://gigaom.com/2015/01/15/the-curious-case-of-angela-merkel-and-her-eu-data-retention-ideas/
Thu, 15 Jan 2015 18:55:10 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=906919In the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called on the European Commission to deliver on its “promise” of a new EU-wide data retention directive to replace the one struck down by the EU’s highest court last year.

Merkel wants to implement this new directive into German law. There’s only one problem: the Commission doesn’t seem to have promised any such thing, at least not in public.

The Court of Justice of the European Union struck down the Data Retention Directive 2006 in April of last year because it was disproportionate and had insufficient safeguards. The directive had mandated that EU countries had to force telecommunications firms to retain metadata about their customers’ communications for between six and 24 months. Even before the CJEU scrapped it, Germany had already stopped implementing it on constitutional grounds.

On Thursday, according to a DPA report, Merkel told German parliamentarians:

Given the cross-party conviction among all interior ministers, both state-level and federal, that we need such minimum retention periods, we should insist that the revision of the directive promised by the EU Commission is quickly completed and then implemented into German law.

That DPA report claims “Brussels is drafting a follow-up that meets the judges’ standards,” but that’s not what the Commission says.

Last month, Netzpolitik reported that new Home Affairs Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos was planning to make such an announcement, and that his department was “now reflecting on the how, rather than the if.” However, after that report came out, the department backtracked, with a spokeswoman saying: “I meant that we are now reflecting on the how to take things forward, rather than if we need a new directive or not.”

An EU source confirmed to me today that the Commission is taking its time evaluating the issues raised by the CJEU ruling, and intends to have an open dialog with the European Parliament, member states, civil society, law enforcement and data protection authorities. Only then will it be able to decide whether there is a need for a new proposal, the source said.

Technically, Merkel could try setting up a new German data protection law without a broader EU directive. However, her own justice minister has firmly rejected the mass surveillance idea, telling German television a few days ago: “With data retention, we also store all data from journalists and restrict freedom of the press. That does not fit together.”

She would also need to somehow make sure that her data retention law didn’t fall foul of the arguments the CJEU used to strike down the EU Data Retention Directive, advice from the EU Legal Service division suggests.

]]>Google is starting to sign up Fiber customers in Austinhttp://gigaom.com/2014/12/01/google-is-starting-to-sign-up-fiber-customers-in-austin/
Mon, 01 Dec 2014 18:48:10 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=897210Google is getting ready to roll out its Fiber gigabit internet service in Austin, Texas, and is now asking individuals and small businesses in South and Southeast Austin to sign up.
[company]Google[/company] is offering three tiers: 1 Gbps will cost $70 a month, 1 gigabit and Google’s Fiber TV service go for $130 a month, and basic 5 Mbps internet is free for consumers who pay a $300 construction fee. That’s the same cost structure as in Kansas City, with the exception that Google is charging an additional $10 a month for the TV package, likely reflecting fees from local broadcasters. Small businesses are being charged $100 for 1 Gbps per month.

Google is once again doing these installs neighborhood by neighborhood, and has different sign-up deadlines for each of its so-called “fiberhoods” in the South and Southeast of the city. The company has yet to announce when it will open up sign-ups for the rest of Austin.

]]>SaveTheInternet.eu campaign begs EU states to back net neutralityhttp://gigaom.com/2014/11/26/savetheinternet-eu-campaign-begs-eu-states-to-back-net-neutrality/
Wed, 26 Nov 2014 10:18:37 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=896370A “SaveTheInternet.eu” coalition of civil society groups has sent a letter to the Council of the EU, which is finalizing the European Union’s new net neutrality rules, urging it not to water them down. Recent leaks suggested this will happen, after years of work to toughen the rules up, alarming EU digital chief Andrus Ansip and digital rights activists alike. The coalition argued that, without meaningful net neutrality rules, large ISPs will become gatekeepers choosing which services get to run in fast and slow lanes, and the economy and human rights will suffer as a result. Citizens are being urged to contact their representatives in the Council, which represents the 28 EU member states, ahead of its Thursday debate on the matter.
]]>EU digital chief sides with Obama in defense of net neutralityhttp://gigaom.com/2014/11/25/eu-digital-chief-sides-with-obama-in-defense-of-net-neutrality/
Tue, 25 Nov 2014 11:23:09 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=894255Andrus Ansip, the European Commission’s new digital chief, has said that he is “really worried” about proposals that would water down the EU’s new neutrality laws before they are finalized.

All the traffic has to be treated equally. The Internet has to stay open for everybody. The president of the United States is using our wording — the wording of the European Parliament in the United States of America… It is allowed to have higher speeds — but not at the expense of others.

Europe’s net neutrality rules were proposed by Ansip’s predecessor, Neelie Kroes, as part of a “Telecom Package” of reforms. Now that it has gone through Parliament, which tightened its definitions of “net neutrality” and the “specialized services” that telecoms firms would be allowed to treat differently from normal internet services, the package is in its final legislative stage: negotiations between the Commission and the Council of the European Union, which represents the national governments of EU member states.

Last week, leaked documents drawn up by the current Italian presidency of the Council showed that member states want those tight definitions removed, and the rules-based approach to net neutrality changed to one of principles that each country could interpret differently. The document also pointed to a revision of Kroes’s proposals for abolishing intra-EU roaming fees and harmonizing radio spectrum deployment across the Union.

A week before that, another leak suggested that Ansip’s boss, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, had asked his commissioners to look out for under-development laws “which we should review together, for example because they have no realistic chance of being adopted in the near future, or because the degree of ambition achievable does not match the objectives sought.”

The same leak referred to a “major new initiative” called the “Digital Single Market Package”, which may indicate something to replace the Telecom Package.

As I noted last week when the Council document leaked, Juncker is known as someone who wants European countries to be drawn closer together. If the Council wants to move against the harmonization of telecommunications rules, creating a patchwork of differing national laws, it would be hard to see Juncker and his “vice president for the digital single market” – Ansip – accepting this outcome.

It remains to be seen whether the answer to this conundrum would involve an about-face from the Council, a reboot of the entire EU net neutrality proposal, or a compromise that leaves Europe without meaningful net neutrality rules.

]]>Mimosa unveils its first consumer product: A Wi-Fi booster for urban dwellershttp://gigaom.com/2014/11/11/mimosa-unveils-its-first-consumer-product-a-wi-fi-booster-for-urban-dwellers/
http://gigaom.com/2014/11/11/mimosa-unveils-its-first-consumer-product-a-wi-fi-booster-for-urban-dwellers/#commentsTue, 11 Nov 2014 17:05:35 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=887925Wireless startup Mimosa has been plugging Wi-Fi into a lot of networking products lately. It first injected Wi-Fi into transport networks by offering a backhaul radio to ISPs. It quickly turned to access networks, proffering up gear that replace the cable or copper line entering your home with a Wi-Fi link. Now it’s offering up its first consumer-facing product: A Wi-Fi router you actually install in your home.

Mimosa wouldn’t be Mimosa if it were just selling any off-the-shelf wireless router. Its C5i doesn’t have an ingress port connecting to your broadband modem. Instead, it pulls its internet connection directly from the airwaves. Specifically, it’s tapping outdoor Wi-Fi networks to deliver you an indoor Wi-Fi connection, sticking with its philosophy that Wi-Fi can be used to handle the broadband link from the network core all the way to the device.

The idea is for wireless ISPs and metro Wi-Fi providers to use the C5i as that final hop into the home. Over the last decade there have been some ambitious government and private projects to use Wi-Fi as the last mile connection to households that couldn’t afford broadband services. While the goal was noble, most of these projects failed because Wi-Fi mounted on a street pole just wasn’t powerful to deliver an adequate connection to the home, Jaime Fink, Mimosa chie\f product officer, told me in an interview.

Mimosa, however, has put its high-power smart antenna technology into a router, which you can stick to any street-facing window. It gathers up those weak signals from the street and redistributes their capacity on the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi throughout a home. Fink said Mimosa believes that it will allow ISPs and cities to put those public hotspot networks back to work for home connectivity.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/11/11/mimosa-unveils-its-first-consumer-product-a-wi-fi-booster-for-urban-dwellers/feed/5Let ISPs lock their customers into longer contracts, new EU digital economy chief suggestshttp://gigaom.com/2014/11/07/let-isps-lock-their-customers-into-longer-contracts-new-eu-digital-economy-chief-suggests/
http://gigaom.com/2014/11/07/let-isps-lock-their-customers-into-longer-contracts-new-eu-digital-economy-chief-suggests/#commentsFri, 07 Nov 2014 17:23:52 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=887135The European Union’s new digital economy commissioner, Günther Oettinger, has already made the dubious claim that big telecoms providers need to make more money following his predecessor’s focus on improving things for consumers. Now we know one way he intends to make this happen.

Oettinger said in a Thursday interview with Stuttgarter Zeitung that he wants to make it harder for people to switch ISP, so as to encourage ISPs to invest more in network-building. He said this would require discussion with regulators (no kidding) but “we need to increase the profitability of such investments by prohibiting changing suppliers for a certain time.”

“I’m not talking about monopolies forever, but for several years, in which one has planning security as an investor,” he said, adding that similar rules apply in the energy industry (Oettinger was until last week the EU energy commissioner.)

Oettinger’s department has confirmed to me that the quote is contextually as it appears. However, it completely flies in the face of what the European Commission was trying to achieve under his predecessor, Neelie Kroes.

Kroes worked hard to “put people back in the driving seat” when it comes to switching ISP. In fact, the telecoms legislative package she came up with — already passed by the European Parliament and now awaiting final approval by member states – gives consumers the right to terminate their communications contracts on one month’s notice, as long as they’re already six months into the contract and are happy to buy out their subsidized equipment and other promotional perks.

The package also lets customers quit their contracts at no cost, if the provider changes their contractual conditions in any way that isn’t “exclusively to the benefit of the end user,” and limits minimum contract terms to two years at most (providers will also have to offer one-year contracts.)

Getting rid of these protections arguably removes the incentive for ISPs to invest in network upgrades, because locked-in customers can’t leave when their service gets worse. That makes Oettinger’s latest idea the most worrying EU tech policy proposal I’ve heard in, ooh, days – the last eyebrow-raiser being Oettinger’s apparent desire to extend Germany’s useless “Google tax” law across the union.

I wonder what Oettinger’s superior, the relatively savvy digital single market commissioner Andrus Ansip, will make of these proposals.

This article was updated on November 9 to note Oettinger’s department’s confirmation of the quote’s context and the fact that Ansip will have the ultimate say over such proposals.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/11/07/let-isps-lock-their-customers-into-longer-contracts-new-eu-digital-economy-chief-suggests/feed/4Hungary plans per-gigabyte “internet tax” on service providershttp://gigaom.com/2014/10/22/hungary-plans-per-gigabyte-internet-tax-on-service-providers/
http://gigaom.com/2014/10/22/hungary-plans-per-gigabyte-internet-tax-on-service-providers/#commentsWed, 22 Oct 2014 11:12:21 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=882814Hungarian internet service providers will be forced to pay a new “internet tax” on the data use they enable, if the country’s parliament passes a new tax bill.

Reports suggest that this bill will go through, as the ruling Fidesz party has a two-thirds parliamentary majority. It would levy a tax of 150 forints, or around 62 U.S. cents, on every gigabyte of data used by ISPs’ customers – an internet-focused extension of an existing tax on phone calls and text messages.

As many fear the ISPs will pass the costs on to their customers, Hungarian internet users are predictably apoplectic, and some have reportedly planned demonstrations for this coming weekend. Fidesz has responded by saying there will be a cap on the tax, perhaps “around one thousand forints,” presumably per month. Economy Minister Mihály Varga has also suggested that competition would stop the ISPs raising their prices.

Telecoms companies would also be able to offset their corporate income tax against the new internet tax and existing telecom tax. Despite all this capping and offsetting, the Hungarian economy ministry said it expects to derive $83 million a year from the tax.

The Hungarian opposition has urged the government to drop its plans, warning that increasing the cost of web usage would take the country back to the 1990s.

Meanwhile, Hungarian web entrepreneur Zsolt Várady, who founded a once-popular but now defunct social network called iWiW, has reportedly sued all the Hungarian political parties that have been in government since 1990, for creating a tax system that allegedly violates his constitutional rights to fair economic competition, enterprise, free economic competition and fair working conditions.

Várady contends that the system is so “impossible” that viable businesses have to resort to tax fraud or evasion, giving the increasingly authoritarian government opportunities for “blackmail and manipulation” of businesses when they need it.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/10/22/hungary-plans-per-gigabyte-internet-tax-on-service-providers/feed/4Networking startup Mimosa develops a Wi-Fi link that could replace DSLhttp://gigaom.com/2014/10/15/networking-startup-mimosa-develops-a-wi-fi-link-that-could-replace-dsl/
http://gigaom.com/2014/10/15/networking-startup-mimosa-develops-a-wi-fi-link-that-could-replace-dsl/#commentsWed, 15 Oct 2014 15:35:37 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=881059Mimosa Networks believes Wi-Fi will play a big role in the future of residential broadband – not just redistributing your internet connection to all of the devices in your home, but providing the actual internet link from your ISP.

The Silicon Valley startup is using new IEEE 802.11ac technologies to create very high-speed links, and it’s developed its own beamforming technologies that can aim those links from a tower to a special antenna mounted on your roof miles away, surpassing Wi-Fi’s traditional range limitations. The result is an inexpensive wireless network that uses unlicensed technology, but can deliver speeds north of 100 Mbps at distances up to 5 or 6 miles, said Jaime Fink, Mimosa chief product officer.

After raising a $20 million Series C round led by NEA, Mimosa launched its first product in August: a gigabit-speed wireless radio used for backhaul (transporting data from a tower to the network core). But on Wednesday it unveiled its first access radios, the core products it plans to sell to its wireless ISP customers starting next year.

A Mimosa C5 access point

The big one is the A5, Mimosa’s access point, but it bears little resemblance to the wireless router sitting in your office. It supports 250 radio connections. Mimosa is using Quantenna’s 802.11ac chips, which support a new technique called multi-user multiple input/multiple output (MU-MIMO) that can send different data streams over the same Wi-Fi channel to separate homes. Precise timing data taken from GPS receivers help the A5 coordinate its transmissions so all of these radios don’t interfere with one another.

Technically a single A5 could host 1,000 individual connections, Fink said, though that would shoulder an enormous amount of capacity on a single access point. Still, that’s not bad for a piece of gear that Mimosa plans to sell for about $1,000 and that requires no spectrum investment from a carrier.

The obvious targets for this kind of technology will be wireless ISPs, especially those operating overseas in countries with little installed wireline infrastructure, Fink said. But Mimosa believes there is a plenty big market for the technology in the U.S., especially in suburban areas. Mimosa’s technology has the range and the speed to blow DSL out of the water, and it’s fast enough to compete with cable broadband in many cases, Fink said.

Fink added that many ISPs in the U.S. are already testing out Mimosa’s backhaul radio and have expressed interest in its access products. The U.S. definitely needs more broadband options. Well, Mimosa claims it has an alternative, but many companies have made the same claim in the past (remember WiMAX). I’m very curious to see if it can deliver.